Küsse [artistic director]

Küsse was practice-based research project that set out to explore how performance a space and the performers’ bodies as a site where intimacy is constructed and deconstructed. Visual and spatial metaphors were articulated through the interrelationship of the performers’ bodies within a paper room set design. Bachelard suggests: ‘the house image would appear to have become the topography of the intimate being’. The room structure connotes a blank canvas filled with potential that evokes and provokes action. Throughout the performance the enactment of fantasies and desires, meetings and partings, the performers’ bodies transform and are transformed by the space. This gradually becomes un-homely or ‘unheimlich (Freud). Thus, a reversal of the metaphor of the ‘home’ as an intimate space to one of incessant physical and psychological eviction.

Questions: How can the spatial design provoke imagery and shape the performance making?

How can Bachelard’s notion of the ‘poetic imagination’ inform performance making?

How can Release Technique be utilised as a method for generating performance material thorough ia process of embodied imagery?

This relates to the performances at the Theatre Universitaire Royal de Liege, X IUTA International World Congress, Liege, Belgium.

Küsse for which my role was as Director, was a Red Room Productions project to open the IUTA (International University Theatre Association) organisations X Annual Congress, in Liege, Belgium at the Universitaire Theatre de Royal Liege. The project aimed to make further links with international organisations involved in theatre and performance.

This practice led research aimed to investigate visual metaphor through a visual dramaturgy and sought to contribute new knowledge of current and emergent dramaturgies within the expanding field of Devised Theatre and the corresponding field of Scenography. Through the process of devising the project sought to expound key themes of exile and displacement derived from the stories of Franz Kafka, with themes of psychological exile that pervade his work.

The spatial metaphors prevalent in Kafka’s writing were explored through the design of a Paper House – a flimsy architectural design made of wood and paper. Through the notion of space as ‘inhabited’, and manipulating and orchestrating the visual elements in the performance environment the performers’ enacted desires, fantasies, meetings and parting, as they wrestle with the house it transforms them into exiles and t is gradually destroyed and becomes unihabitable. The house thus becomes ‘Unheimlich’ (Freud), a place of psychological and physical eviction.

Contextualised by Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space (1969), specifically the image of the ‘house’ – ‘for a knowledge of intimacy, localisation of the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent that a determination of dates’ (Bachelard 1969: 9) and ‘to read a house or a room…both house and room are psychological diagrams and guide writers and poets in their analysis of intimacy’ (ibid: 38). For Bachelard the house provides solace and nostalgia, inviting us home. For Kafka the house is a threatening place, filled with fear and impossible intimacy, a place of interminable noise and disturbance.

Küsse was presented at the IUTA congress, Exeter Ignite Festival, Exeter Phoenix, and University Theatre, as part of Bath Spa Live. The research was presented at 5th Global Conference on Performance – Visual Aspects of Performance Practice, Prague, in November 2014.

Actor: Lauren Thompson
Actor: Richard Hills-Ingyon,
Costume designer: Cathy Kelly
Lighting designer: Dan Crompton
Director: Mary Steadman

• http://www.aitaiata.org/gil/2014/05/inte...
• http://www.exeterphoenix.org.uk/events/k...
• https://www.marysteadman.co.uk/past-work